This report is appearing here somewhat belatedly; it was first published by the ABC's PM program at the end of February this year.  It does not date, however, for it provides an example of what happens when our politicians have not done their homework on jihad.  It is good that politicians like Mr Ferguson support the perfectly rational and legitimate desire of (Melanesian non-Muslim) West Papuans for independence from the oppressive imperial and colonial rule of (Malay Muslim) Indonesia.  It is not good that the same Mr Ferguson seems to think that the Plight of the Poor Palestinians (TM) is identical with that of the genuinely-oppressed and exploited West Papuans.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-28/labor-mps-defy-ban-on-west-papua-meeting/3858188

As reported on PM by Alexandra Kirk of Australia's ABC.

'Labor MPs Defy West Papua Meeting Ban'.

'A small group of Federal Government backbenchers has defied a party warning by attending an event promoting human rights protection in West Papua.

'The Greens (the very same Greens who simply refuse to see, or cannot see, that the Arab Muslim war against the Jewish state of Israel is a Jihad, and part of the Global Jihad - CM) hosted the launch of the Australia-Pacific chapter of International Parliamentarians for West Papua in Parliament House today.

'West Papua, a province of Indonesia, has been at the centre of a long-running campaign for independence.

'This morning, acting Foreign Affairs Minister Craig Emerson (the same utterly clueless Craig Emerson who recently declared that the Muslim desecration of the war graves of Jewish and Christian allied soldiers in Libya had nothing to do with Islam - "there is nothing in Islam that would warrant this kind of behaviour" - a claim sufficiently refuted by Dr Mark Durie's excellent article, 'The Islamic tradition of breaking the cross", which see here:

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2920/islam-tradition-breaking-cross

 - CM) urged caucus members not to attend the event.

'Labor backbencher Laurie Ferguson defied Dr Emerson's advice and attended the launch.

'He says he regarded Dr Emerson's urgings as "unprecedented, ridiculous and ill-informed".

"We're talking about a country where people get 15 years in jail for raising a flag, where on all common analyses of Indonesian society it is the second worst province in regards to longevity of people's life, child, infant mortality, income levels", he said.

And yet Indonesia is removing from West Papua daily an enormous revenue from timber - unsustainably logged - and mining of gold and other minerals. I do wonder, too, which is the worst province in terms of basic quality-of-life indicators.  Is it Indonesia's most heavily sharia-ised province, or one of the other regions where the indigenous population is not Muslim but, rather, majority non-Muslim? - CM

'Mr Ferguson says there are about 60 West Papuans being held as political prisoners and there are allegations of heavy militarisation of the province.

"So for a variety of reasons I think this is overdue", he said.

'Mr Ferguson says Dr Emerson banned Labor MPs from attending the conference.

"That's the tone I got from him.  He had to be told that's not going to occur," he said.

"He was telling people not to attend.  And, as I say, the former speaker and the chairman of caucus kind of had to clarify people's rights in this place."

'Poor understanding'

'Mr Ferguson says Dr Emerson's actions reflect a poor understanding of what groups like the West Papuan friendship group do in the Parliament.

'He says former foreign minister Kevin Rudd would never have banned MPs from attending today's conference.

"Absolutely not.  He's had experience with a variety of other parallel groups on other countries, other issues of human rights", he said.  "In actual fact he's been very cooperative with some of those groups.  There's no way he would have went (sic: gone - CM) down this road at all."

'Mr Ferguson has compared the West Papuan struggle for independence with that of East Timor, Western Sahara, Palestine, and Burma.

One of these things is not like the other; one of these things doesn't belong.  The Melanesian non-Muslim West Papuan struggle to get out from under the yoke of the Indonesian Malay Muslim imperial invaders and occupiers who are waging a relentless jihad to subdue and, ultimately, destroy or Islamise them, and plunder their resources, is precisely identical with the - ultimately successful - struggle of the non-Muslim East Timorese against those same Indonesian Malay Muslim imperial invaders, occupiers and Islamisers.  In Burma, the non-Bama peoples - many of them Christianised - are being treated abominably by the nominally-Buddhist Bama-dominated military dictatorship that currently rules - and ruins - the country.  In Western Sahara one Muslim entity - Morocco - is oppressing another.  So far, so good. We have three cases in which there is a persecuted minority (or minorities) and a dominant - and cruelly oppressive - majority.  In Timor a Muslim imperial power oppressed a non-Muslim population within a territory where that population was the numerical majority; in Western Sahara a large Muslim state (Morocco) oppresses another, smaller population of Muslims; in Burma a non-Muslim (mostly Buddhist) dominant ethnicity oppresses smaller groups of different ethnicity, some of them largely of a different religion.  And in each case, quite rightly, Mr Ferguson sides with the underdog.

But the issue in 'Palestine' is quite different.  the tiny Jewish state of Israel comprises the traditional lands and sacred sites of the tiny Jewish people - there are only 14 million Jews alive in the whole wide world, half of whom reside in Israel.  And a good half of the population of Israel is made up of refugees (or descendants of refugees) from assorted Islamised lands wherein, as a Jewish minority (long pre-dating in residence, in all cases, the arrival of Muslim invaders and occupiers) they had been subjected by the Muslim majority to exactly the same kinds of abuses, for exactly the same kinds of Islamic reasons, as the East Timorese suffered and the West Papuans now suffer from their Indonesian Muslim overlords.  

Mr Ferguson needs to do some reading.  If he read Bat Yeor, 'The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam', or if he read Conor Cruise O'Brien's "The Siege", or John Roy Carlson's "Cairo to Damascus", or James Parke's 'Whose Land?', or if he read the introductory essays in Andrew Bostom's, 'Legacy of Jihad' and 'Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism", or Martha Gellhorn's classic 1961 article "The Arabs of Palestine", or if he simply read Steven Simpson's lapidary article, "Why Islam Will Never Accept the State of Israel"

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/why_islam_will_never_accept_th.html

he would discover that those so-called Poor Palestinians are merely a group of Arab Muslims who comprise the local shock troops of the Jihad that is waged against Israel by the entire Muslim world, both Arab and non-Arab.

http://drybonesblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/repackaging.html

The goal of that Jihad is to reverse the Jews' having wrested back their (minuscule) ancient homeland from the clutches of the vast Empire of Islam; to force Jews back under Muslim imperial rule.  It is the Jews of Israel, not the 'Palestinians' (the local Arab Muslims who seek to reimpose Arab Muslim imperial domination over Jews) who are like the Melanesian Christians and animists of East Timor (which is also very, very tiny in comparison to the enormous swathe of land and sea currently controlled by Indonesian Malay Muslims, based in Java).  The wars the Jews of Israel fought in 1948 and in 1953 and in 1967 and in 1973, and lesser wars with the PLO in Lebanon in the 1980s and with Hezbollah in 2006 and with Hamas in Gaza in 2009, were wars of sheer survival against a far richer and more numerous and ruthlessly-cruel enemy (the PLO, Hezbollah and Hamas must be recognised as proxies or catspaws of the Ummah).  They fought for freedom; to be able to live as free people rather than as despised, exploited, and frequently mass-murdered dhimmi near-slaves.  And they have treated the Arab Muslims who chose to remain in their midst - and those who came under their control after 1967 - with far more decency than Arab Muslims anywhere have ever shown toward any Jews (or any other non-Arab/ non-Muslim minority) over whom those Arab Muslims held power. Mr Ferguson's sympathy for the 'Palestinians' is completely misplaced. They are not an oppressed minority at all; they are merely the local representatives, the shock-troops and Fifth Columnists of a very large imperially-minded gestalt, the Ummah, that intends to be ruthlessly oppressive toward anybody it can get under its boots.

But now, back to the matter in hand: how Australia, and Australian politicians, should behave toward the West Papuans. - CM

"There's a wide variety of groups in this Parliament over my 20 years where people from all parties have taken up these issues and this is a very similar situation", he said.

"What we want to do is make sure that the Indonesian government's initiatives to have discussions about the form of government in West Papua are not thwarted by the military and the police and to make sure that there is a focus on human rights".

Good luck with that.  The Muslims of Indonesia - like Muslim imperialists everywhere, like the Turkish Muslims who once occupied and oppressed Greece, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, or like the Moorish Muslims who occupied Spain or those who invaded and occupied India - will never let go of any piece of turf they have once seized, nor release from bondage any infidel population over which they have gained the upper hand, unless they are compelled to do so by main force.  And a brief study of the subjects of hudna, Hudaybiyya, and islamic deception - taqiyya - would show Mr Ferguson, if he were prepared to undertake it with an open mind, just exactly why anything said or promised or 'agreed' by Muslim Indonesia must be taken with a large tablespoonful of salt. - CM

'Sensitive issue'

'But he says Australia's close relationship with Indonesia makes it a sensitive issue'.

What relationship of any value or longevity can an Infidel state like Australia have with a Muslim-ruled, majority-Muslim and rapidly sharia-izing entity like Indonesia?  This 'close relationship' about which our politicians of all parties like to prate has been giving me the screaming willies ever since I first began to understand what Islam is all about. - CM

"We'd like Australia to be a bit more proactive in these matters, but we do understand the difficulties and I don't regard the difficulty as being the involvement of Australian companies by the way in West Papua", he said.

"It's more our long-term relationship with the country".  

Dear Mr Ferguson, no non-Muslim person or entity or nation can have a healthy long-term relationship with a Muslim person, entity or nation.  Such 'relationships' usually turn out to be downright unhealthy for the non-Muslim partner. - CM

'Mr Ferguson says he hopes that if Dr Emerson was to become foreign minister, he would reconsider his stance on West Papua...

'Another Labor caucus source has told PM that Dr Emerson strongly urged caucus members not to participate on the grounds that the group was convened by the Greens who advocate independence for West Papua, which is not Labor policy.

I am very glad that the Greens advocate independence for West Papua.  No non-Muslim minority is ever entirely free or safe under Muslim rule. Their human rights - beginning with their right to life itself - will never be genuinely recognised or protected by Muslims within any Muslim state.   Now, if only the Greens, who tend to reflexively and blindly root for the Poooor Palestinians (TM) could get it through their heads that Israel (like East Timor) is the native land of a group of non-Muslims who were ferociously oppressed by Muslims but have shaken off the Muslim yoke and that (as the East Timorese will sooner or later find themselves having to do, for Muslims never, never accept the loss of any piece of territory they once held) the Jews of Israel have had to fight in order to defeat repeated and violent Muslim attempts to reimpose that yoke upon them... - CM